Paul Edmund Wischmeyer

Paul Wischmeyer, MD, EDIC, FASPEN, FCCM is a nutrition, exercise, critical care, and perioperative physician-researcher who specializes in enhancing preparation and recovery from surgery, critical care and COVID-19. He serves as a Tenured Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery at Duke. He also serves as the Associate Vice Chair for Clinical Research in the Department of Anesthesiology and Director of the TPN/Nutrition Team at Duke. Dr. Wischmeyer earned his medical degree with honors at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where he was elected into the honor society of Alpha Omega Alpha for outstanding academic achievement. He completed his pediatric internship at University of Colorado Children’s Hospital and his anesthesiology/critical care residency training at the University of Chicago. He also completed a Clinical Pharmacology fellowship and the NIH K30 Clinical Research Scientist Training Program while at University of Chicago.

Dr. Wischmeyer’s clinical and research focus is in critical care, perioperative care exercise, and nutrition to help patients prepare and recover from illness and surgery. His research interests include surgical and ICU nutrition and exercise rehabilitation; role of parenteral, enteral, and oral nutrition to improve patient outcomes; perioperative optimization; post-illness muscle mass and functional recovery; and probiotics/microbiome. His research interests have also recently been focused on COVID-19 research into COVID-19 metabolism, role of probiotics in COVID19 prevention and treatment, and exercise and nutrition programs to recover from COVID-19 and Long COVID-19. Dr. Wischmeyer’s research group has been awarded multiple NIH, DOD, and other peer reviewed grants to perform research ranging from basic mechanistic cell work to large-scale multi-center clinical trials in the fields of critical care, perioperative medicine, nutrition, illness metabolism, microbiome/probiotics, and exercise interventions to improve functional outcomes. For his research work and clinical work, Dr. Wischmeyer has received numerous awards from national and international societies including, The Jeffrey Silverstein Award and Memorial Lecture for Humanism in Medicine from the American Delirium Society, The John M. Kinney Award for the most significant contribution to field of general nutrition, the Stanley Dudrick Research Scholar Award and the 2025 Bruce Bistrian Award for Clinical Nutrition Mentorship by the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition and The Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Parenteral Nutrition Society (IPENEMA) for significant contributions to the field of nutrition. Dr. Wischmeyer has over 250 peer-reviewed publications in critical care, anesthesiology, and nutrition, including in the New England Journal of Medicine. Finally, he has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international medical meetings delivering over 1000 invited presentations over his career. He has an H-index of 77 with over 20,000 citations to his work, including 1 publication with > 1000 citations and >60 publications with > 100 citations. He is also the founder and co-director of the Duke Online Clinical Nutrition Fellowship, an international fellowship to provide clinical nutrition training to healthcare providers worldwide, as well as unique scholarship opportunities for healthcare providers in developing nations.

Dr. Wischmeyer passion for helping patients recover from illness and surgery arises from his personal experiences as both doctor and patient in the ICU. Dr. Wischmeyer has undergone over 27 major surgeries and personally experienced multiple ICU stays due to a childhood GI illness that took more than half of his intestinal tract. Thus, preparation for surgery/critical care and recovery from illness are a way of life for Dr. Wischmeyer that he is passionate about teaching his patients and other caregivers worldwide.